How does the crowding out work here? I'm not being pedantic, I'm genuinely curious about the dynamics as you see them.

My experience in the publishing world is that there is already an infinite supply of writing. Lots of things serve as filters, some for better and some for worse, but ultimately the quality of the writing (however we define that) vs. the field is part of that filter. There is a competition for our limited little attention spans and finite waking hours, and writing better suited to our tastes tends to win out.

I don't see how that dynamic changes with AI. If all writers have more or less equal access to AI, some writers will use it in ways that result in writing I enjoy more than others. Some won't use it at all and still write work I really like. The majority of people writing with or without AI, just as today, won't write stuff I really want to read.

I don't know if I've ever read a piece of SEO-driven content marketing and thought it was particularly profound or that it made an impact on me. Or that I really had an inherently meaningful connection to the author. I sort of don't care if people generate 100x more of that sort of thing. It makes Google searches less effective, I guess? Or it may make my For You Page on Instagram less human-rich?

I've read some nice poetry though. I usually go looking for it. There are a handful of authors I tend to like consistently. The overall volume of poetry published (it's quite a lot!) doesn't really have an effect on my preference for their work. If there was 1,000,000 times more poetry published because of AI, I don't think it would prevent me from seeking out new poems from writers/publishers/curators I like, nor would I probably really notice.

Human nature is to adapt and extend, sometimes extinguish. If there is an infinite supply of AI slop, we will stop seeing AI slop.

On your next highway trip, keep track of how many lawyer ads you really "see". My bet is that you see a whole lot of them but ultimately, only a handful of them stick because they are funny/clever/interesting in some way.

If "attention is all you need", then the lack of attention on AI slop will kill it far more efficiently than any amount of handwringing.

Did you watch every film produced this year? Or even 1% of them? Why would books be any different?

Your last sentence reminded me of a quote by Alfred North Whitehead which I read many years ago in one of my CS textbooks: “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” I think about the essential idea of this statement quite often but didn’t remember the exact phrasing. As I went to look that up, I was thinking to myself something like “bet he would’ve changed his mind if he knew about LLMs!” but in finding the quote with its wider context, it appears he would’ve been thrilled:

“It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.”

Apparently, part of his philosophical thought was that the ultimate goal of mathematics is to reduce (maybe even eliminate) how much thinking we do. Not exactly what I thought he was going for all these years lol. I wouldn’t read much more into it but it’s not hard to see how the statement could be perceived as this renowned early 20th century mathematician, logician and philosopher implying that he would’ve have loved the idea of machines reducing the need for research and development in engineering and mathematics (even if only to allow researchers time to focus on more important things).

Edit: As I’m not familiar with the breadth of his works and know of them primarily through secondary sources, I can also see how what he said meaning that the purpose of mathematics is automation in a very general sense, so that humans can reduce the need to think about things other than survival and comfort, and being a mathematician, he likely saw mathematics, philosophy and knowledge in general as one of those “leisure” activities we should be thinking about instead.

So who is it for if no humans are consuming those papers?

Am I understanding you right, you're saying AI spam is not real?

Effort is sort of a see-saw; if the writer puts in less effort, the reader needs to put in more to decipher it. If the writer literally puts in so little effort that the result is completely wrong, the reader needs to do the work to check it and find the correction.

If you put in zero effort on some programming knowledge, they would be to put in the effort to confirm that you're correct.

> I could put zero effort into writing a quick post on some piece of programming knowledge

For starters, if you're writing something yourself, it's not "zero-effort". It might be low-effort, but you still put some effort into it. And low-effort doesn't mean worthless, as you illustrate ("but if someone needed that information...").

Consider that the refrain seems to be: "I won't put more energy reading something than you put into writing it". A "quick" post takes little energy to write, and little energy to read. That's fine!

Why do you trust something that is LLM-generated is authoritative?

Even if, on the most good-faith scenario, someone did all the research them told an LLM to add more pizzazz for some reason, there is still a chance that the LLM hallucinate a lie here and there that the author might have skipped when proof-reading if they proof-read it at all.

I can't trust a machine specialized in generating convincing bullshit.

Gaps. Load-bearing gaps.

This is something that gets glossed over a lot in the debate. "Writing to convey functional information" has a different set of success criteria than "Writing to convey emotion and shared human experience". One might still legitimately argue that knowing that a text is LLM-generated undermines confidence in the former (there's no guarantee that a coherent mind exists that can clarify ambiguities); but much _less_ so than for the latter.

It seems better for people to simply write in their native tongue. By translating what you write before sharing it, you are robbing readers from the opportunity of using future, better translation technology. It freezes text at the current capabilities of translation software. It also drives us towards a monolonguistic world, and I think a lot would be lost in that (said as a monolonguistic English speaker).

I think there is a quantifiable measure-create a test dataset containing questions and human expert-written answers; give the questions to an AI to get corresponding AI-generated answers; then ask humans to guess which answer was human-written and which was AI-generated; now you can measure how much better than chance the humans perform at AI output detection, which gives you a quantifiable measure of the human-likeness of the AI responses.

> I'm fine with AI writing as long its not bad. The issue is that its far easier to produce large amounts of poorly made AI writing over well made AI writing.

AI writing is some average over all writing the model was trained on (with some RLHF on top). It is mediocre by definition.

I'm not going to bother engaging with online posts if they all turn into generated replies.

> Do you value their output because they are human

Their output does have intrinsic value yes...

Same reason I value home made cooking, home made furniture, and my kids drawings. Not everything is about the result itself. The process is important to me. Knowing that there is a human on the other side matters. In fact, learning that there is/isn't changes my perception entirely.